Decoding Visual fMRI Stimuli from Human Brain Based on Graph Convolutional Neural Network

Abstract

Brain decoding is to predict the external stimulus information from the collected brain response activities, and visual information is one of the most important sources of external stimulus information. Decoding functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) based on visual stimulation is helpful in understanding the working mechanism of the brain visual function regions. Traditional brain decoding algorithms cannot accurately extract stimuli features from fMRI. To address these shortcomings, this paper proposed a brain decoding algorithm based on a graph convolution network (GCN). Firstly, 11 regions of interest (ROI) were selected according to the human brain visual function regions, which can avoid the noise interference of the non-visual regions of the human brain; then, a deep three-dimensional convolution neural network was specially designed to extract the features of these 11 regions; next, the GCN was used to extract the functional correlation features between the different human brain visual regions. Furthermore, to avoid the problem of gradient disappearance when there were too many layers of graph convolutional neural network, the residual connections were adopted in our algorithm, which helped to integrate different levels of features in order to improve the accuracy of the proposed GCN. The proposed algorithm was tested on the public dataset, and the recognition accuracy reached 98.67%. Compared with the other state-of-the-art algorithms, the proposed algorithm performed the best.